Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ History of Blue Eyes ❯ The Window ( Chapter 3 )

Title: History of Blue Eyes

Author: Something Like Human

Rating: teen (13+)

Warnings: Post EW, Preventers, Author resurrection of characters and tweaking of history/timeline, nothing but strong friendship/brotherhood between the pilots (as in if you want to see hints of anything more, squint really, really hard. Sorry yaoi-ophiles.)

 

My son and I followed Lady Une down the hallway and into a conference room. The room was dim but there was a large window overlooking the Preventers grounds a few floors below. It was landscaped like any other government building so it really was not very exciting. But sometimes, it was just nice to see naturally growing grass. I walked up to the window and placed my hand on the frame. I stood for a second soaking up the sunlight.

After a moment, I turned and looked at Heero again. The young man was leaning with his back against the wall right next to the door. From where he was standing, it looked like he wanted nothing more than to escape this room and run away from me. His body appeared stiff and his face looked as hard and cold as stone. He had never been a happy child; he tended more towards being sullen and quiet. I could tell already that growing up had not changed that in him.

“You could at least say something, Son.”

He raised his eyes to glare at me. They were that same startling blue that they were when he was small but they had more intensity behind them. He had aged a hundred years in the ten that I had left him. I wanted nothing more than to hug him like I had when he was just a toddler but I instinctively knew that I would probably be hurt if I attempted it.

“Look, Heero,” I started as I walked closer to him. I made an effort to use his chosen name. When I gave it a thought, it was actually his middle name and I doubted that he would ever want to go by his first name since at that moment; he looked like he hated me. “I am sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“I'm not going to try to give you excuses or lame explanations,” I explained to him. “My apologies are really all I can offer you.”

“I really should have shot you back on X-18999.”

“That would have saved us both a lot of time and effort,” I replied wryly. I leaned against the wall near him but still an arm's reach away. At the quirk of his eyebrow, which I took for an indication to explain what I just said, I continued, “I knew that the job was a set up for me but it was also the best opportunity to get you somewhere that was at least partially safe.”

“Safe?” The young man scoffed pushing off of the wall and walking towards the window. “We had destroyed much of the city on that colony and the idiots running it practically flooded the place trying to put out the fires. Not to mention, that was where Dr. J found me. And let's just say that going from being a hit man's assistant to being a terrorist was a big improvement.”

I let what he had told me sink in as Heero stood looking out the window. The little bits of information that had been present throughout the conversation here and back with the others finally fell into a semblance of order. “So you were a Gundam Pilot.”

“Not exactly an idyllic childhood,” he snidely replied.

“Again, all I can do for you is to apologize,” I sighed. “I can't give you back your childhood, as much as I want to.”

“No, you can't give it back,” my son practically barked at me. His anger was evident as he raises those piercing eyes to me again. “Although, I am beginning to see that you lied to me; you told me that `space took everything away from me'. You were the one who took everything away from me - my own father.”

“You would have had a worse childhood if I wouldn't have taken you from your home,” I explained. I raked a hand through my hair and tried to come up with an easy way to explain everything. “It was because I was from space, a colonist that your grandfather did not approve of me. It was that and the fact that I wasn't Japanese, obviously.”

I pulled out one of the room's many matching chairs and sank myself down into it. They were definitely corporate type chairs that I swear are made to keep a person awake because of how uncomfortable they are. I motioned for Heero to take a chair also but he just continued to stand in front of the window. The intensity of his glare makes me wonder if he's ever done interrogations before because he would be very good at it.

“He was a very proud man that unfortunately had a very beautiful daughter,” I continued cursing myself for making it sound like I was a lecherous beast. I could not hold my son's gaze so I let my eyes drift downwards to hazily stare at the carpet. “She was barely seventeen and I had just a few months past my eighteenth birthday. So we both were very much too young for anything serious. I was Earthside between assignments and we met during a spring festival in town.”

I remembered how beautiful she looked with her hair pinned up and a kimono on. I also recalled how tiny she was next to me when we bumped into each other in the crowd. I could still imagine the faint gloss on her lips as they parted when she turned her face upwards to look at me. I recalled how later, she told me that she fell in love with the blue of my eyes because she had never seen eyes that color up close.

“Kaiya had just started at the University. She was so brilliant it was amazing. We started seeing more of each other between her classes so that her father would not find out. He was very strict with her and had great expectations for her. I don't blame him for that, she had great potential. But like the teenagers we were, we didn't see the consequences of what we were doing. I had to leave shortly after that; I had another assignment but I promised her that I would return.”

I lifted my eyes to regard my son again. Now he was perched slightly on the window sill and watching me with what appeared to be mild interest. I took it as a small victory since he was actually giving me a chance to explain everything. I cleared my throat and picked up where I had left off, “The assignment was followed by another, then another, and another. I was kept off the Earth for over two years. There was so much going on in the colonies at the time.

“When I returned, I could not find Kaiya at the University. When I gained access to their computers in an effort to see when she had either graduated or transferred, I found that she had withdrew a few months after I had left her. When I did gain information on her, I found that she had been cloistered in her family's home and rarely seen in two years. That was when I also discovered what our affair had created. I shocked to say the least to see records of an `Odin Hiroshi Lowe' listed at the local hospital.”

“So you had never tried to contact her in over two years?”

I finally had a response from him. Although his words were spoken like ice and full of reproach, I was slightly relieved that was intent on hearing the truth from me. “I couldn't for fear of her father finding out. I had given her a way to contact me but had never heard form her. Truthfully, I figured that she had gotten over me and moved on with her life after how long it had been. I only looked for her on the off chance that she hadn't. It had been a lonely two years for me since I moved from assignment to assignment without having enough time to form any sort of personal relationships whatsoever.”

“So you never really loved her - my mother?” He asked. I would have never expected him to say that. He appeared to be the type that would not worry about the trivialities of love. Maybe, just maybe, his heart was not as ice cold as his eyes.

“I did lover her - and I believe at some point that she did love me in return. It was a young love, a naïve love, though,” I confessed. “We did not see the consequences of our love and the difficult choices it would force us to make.”

“Well, obviously you chose to leave her and take me,” Heero downright spat. I could see the hurt in his eyes and I knew that he needed to learn the truth of situation.

“I went to her father after that - seeing as I was a bit older and wiser then. I tried to make up for what I had done, but he was a hard man and very traditional,” I stopped when he gave me a look that he already heard me say it a million times. “As you can guess, I was not well received.”

“What did you expect, old man?” Heero replied snidely.

I snorted at his remark. He always got down to the point. I took a moment and just looked at my son. He was full grown now, not the tiny eight-year old as he was when I left him. His dark hair was still hanging in his eyes like he needed a hair cut. I always marveled at the color of it, not my ash blond and not her black - but almost a mix of the two. It looked like one had added a bit of cream to a strong cup of coffee and stirred until it was a deep brown. His eyes were another story. They were the almond shape of his mothers and the blue of mine. Genetically, that would be almost impossible so I had always suspected that somewhere in his grandfather's ancestry was someone not as Japanese as he would like to admit.

“Long story short, my boy, I had the choice to take you or give you up forever.”

“So you took me from my home and family and made me into your little assistant.”

Ouch. I saw that I needed to explain a little better than that. “You see… Heero, it is never that simple. I took you because it would give your mother another chance at life. Her father had found a man, which coincidentally met his standards, who would take Kaiya as his wife but not if she still had you. He wanted the little mixed blood kid to disappear. So it was either I take you away from Japan or you were going to be sent to an orphanage.”

He went completely still where he was leaning against the window. I watched him slowly draw a deep breath and then another. It was like watching a computer process a long string of information, the machine could not run anything else while it was processing. Then slowly he just deflated. His body relaxed and he sat fully on the sill. He ran a hand through his hair while looking at the floor. I remained silent to let him have his space to think.

“This is hard,” he finally muttered. When I looked at him, he went on, “I wanted to blame you for every bad thing in my life.”

I waited for him to go on but he did not. So I tried to get him to talk again, “So you don't blame me now?”

He snorted, “Not for everything. Don't get me wrong, old man, I still hold you at fault for a lot of things, just not everything.”

“Well, that's good to know,” I replied with a slight chuckle. “So who do you blame?”

“I don't know any more,” Heero sighed. He rose from the window sill and pulled out one of the chairs at the table that was a little ways down from where I was seated. He sunk into the chair. “There were too many factors involved to blame one person. I don't know…”

I listened as he stumbled with his thoughts and finished them for him. “You don't know who to hate; what direction you need to focus your hurt feelings on.”

“Yeah,” my son nodded and then smirked at me. “Trying to prove that the elderly are wise?”

“Can it, brat! You're not too old for me take you over my knee,” I teased which made him snort in response.

“So what do we do now? We should get to work on our cases, but…”

“What do we do now that we found each other?” I clarified. We sat looking at each other for a long, silent moment. Then muffled through the door we heard the voice of one of his colleagues.

“You find Heero's family and figure this mess out!”

“Duo, what have I told you about eavesdropping?”

 

tbc.